Replacement for KDateTime

[John Layt]

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On 2 August 2015 at 16:08, Martin Klapetek <martin.klapetek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 3:26 PM, John Layt <john at layt.net> wrote:

Yes, KLocale was in many ways the best localization library around, I
and others worked hard to make it that good, but ultimately it's one
that lost because it made KDE a walled garden and failed to play well
with others. ICU is an ugly mess, but it's a supported, sponsored,
ubiquitous mess that is the industry standard. Sometimes you just have
to take a stepp backwards in order to be able to move forward.

For a little bit more background on why see
https://community.kde.org/KDE_Core/KLocale and
https://community.kde.org/KDE_Core/Platform_11/Locale

> Maybe it could be worth bringing KLocale back in some limited form
> as an intermediate solution?

People are free to liberate it from kdelibs4support and embed it
themselves, but it's a lot to ship and maintain, and at the end of the
day you end up with localization that doesn't match what the rest of
the system does.

> Alternatively, do you John have any roadmap about QLocale? Perhaps
> we could help with filling the missing bits into QLocale directly too.

The roadmap was waiting on two things: me to get motivated to work on
Option 3 after burning out on the first two rejected options, and for
Qt to drop Windows XP/Vista support. We can't get new Locale stuff
into Qt that only works on a couple of platforms, it has to work on
every platform from day 1 with some lowest common denominator of
features, and Windows XP was so pathetic we couldn't do much more with
it than QLocale already does. With XP/Vista gone, we can target a more
useful feature set. But even once all that is implemented, I still
have to convince Lars and Thiago to accept it :-)

I've recently been trying to update the plan at
http://wiki.qt.io/Locale_Support_in_Qt_5 for those interested, it
provides a lot of background detail about what we want to do and why
it has been so hard to achieve. Frankly, 18 months ago I had been
looking for sponsorship to implement all this as it is a massive
undertaking, but it's one of those things everyone wants to just work
but no-one is interested in paying to be done right.